CHAPTER 17
Laura Rademaker and Ian Anderson
You might have heard that Indigenous self-determination is over. That it failed. Perhaps rumour reached you that it was a lost cause to begin with; a policy with good intentions, but poor outcomes. Or maybe you have doubts that it was ever properly tried, that Indigenous people were ever given a chance to manage their own affairs. ‘Self-determination’, by this view, was an empty promise. The term is associated with the policy agenda introduced by the Whitlam government in 1973. Under the banner of ‘self-determination’, Gough Whitlam held a royal commission into Aboriginal Land Rights (the Woodward Commission), set up a federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, affirmed First Nations’ cultures and funded Indigenous corporations. Whether this actually amounted to ‘self-determination’ as First Nations peoples themselves (or the United Nations, for that matter) hoped for is debatable. Either way, many scholars and activists consider the 1970s and 1980s a high point for self-determination in Australia.1
After that, supposedly, things fell apart. In the decades that followed, government commitment to the language and ideals of self-determination faltered and even withered away altogether. In the early years of the twenty-first century, some thinkers pointed to continuing socioeconomic inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to argue that self-determination had failed.2 Governments should try a new approach, they said. For some conservatives, expressions of self-determination through national forms of Indigenous representation contradicted their ideals of the equality of citizens and, they said, divided the nation. In 2005, therefore, the Howard government dismantled the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which the Hawke government had set up to provide a nationwide elected Indigenous structure of governance and representation.3 Next, the Howard government’s 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (‘the Intervention’) wound back many of the self-governing freedoms of remote communities (while also boosting funding for Indigenous organisations on the ground). Linguist and anthropologist Peter Sutton’s 2009 The Politics of Suffering along with Guugu Yimirhirr lawyer and activist Noel Pearson’s various writings called for a new policy consensus, arguing that self-determination had been unsuccessful.4 Meanwhile, thinkers and activists on the left also argued the policy had failed, but for the opposite reason; true self-determination had never properly been attempted.5 Both sides believed self-determination was over.
But we are not so convinced that self-determination, either as policy framework or political vision, is done with. This is partly because we think self-determination can be understood in a broader, more holistic way. There are different ways to think about self-determination. Some emphasise governance (with self-determination existing on a spectrum from mere consultation to full self-governance), others emphasise cultural rights and identity. We focus here on self-determination as the policy framework introduced in the 1970s. But we also see it as an ongoing Indigenous project that preceded and outlives that policy.6 Self-determination includes cultural resurgence – language and the arts – and the work of historical truth-telling as well as First Nations’ political interventions, and none of these shows signs of decline. Although the state might constrain a First Nations polity, First Nations people themselves are drawing on their political networks, visions and capacities right now.7 So although governments’ commitment to self-determination has waned, First Nations peoples have found other ways to seize control of the policy agenda.
One way that First Nations people took control was through their own organisations. Looking to history, we see that the policy changes of the 1970s prepared the ground for the growth of an Indigenous organisational and institutional sector that now has a life of its own. While governments have created contexts that have variously hindered or supported Indigenous self-determination, whatever the policy context, the self-determination ‘genie’ is out of the bottle. First Nations’ self-determination is not waiting for governments. First Nations people are not only asking governments to work with them, they are resetting the terms of engagement so that governments cannot work without them.
The origins of the Indigenous sector
The Indigenous community-controlled sector is made up of an array of non-profit organisations based in Indigenous communities, governed by boards made up of Indigenous people and serving the interests of Indigenous communities. Although Whitlam often gets the credit, it was not his invention. It began with the initiatives of First Nations peoples. Aboriginal people in places like Redfern looked to the example of the Black Panther Party in the United States, which was running urban survival programs such as medical clinics for Black communities.8 Inspired, the Aboriginal Legal Service opened a shopfront offering legal representation in Redfern in 1970 after activists began recording incidents of police violence.9 The Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) came the following year. In 1972, the Murawing Preschool and Childcare Service opened as a breakfast program run out of the AMS, with Aboriginal women in full control from 1973. Around the same time, the Aboriginal Housing Company also began operation in inner Sydney.10 A group of these same community organisers from Redfern set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in early 1972. Legal academic Larissa Behrendt (Eualeyai Kamillaroi) argued that the Embassy’s commitment to building Aboriginal-controlled institutions – the AMS, the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal community-controlled childcare and the Black Theatre – ensured its enduring legacy.11
So the Whitlam government’s 1973 commitment to self-determination was in response to the calls of First Nations people; self-determination began as an Indigenous project not a government agenda.12 The Black Theatre (established in 1972) actually announced Whitlam’s successful election during the interval of its performance of ‘Basically Black’ in December 1972.13 They came first. Whitlam’s new Department of Aboriginal Affairs had an enormous budget and Aboriginal organisations such as those in Redfern suddenly received generous funding with minimal government oversight, at first.14 But even in the 1970s, the Indigenous sector’s visions quickly diverged from those of governments. Governments were mostly interested in achieving socioeconomic parity with the non-Indigenous population, but the Indigenous sector understood itself as something more; it was to be a means of achieving self-determination. It therefore expected full Indigenous control of its funding, governance and activities.15 For these activists, government funding for Indigenous organisations was not charity or dependence; it was their due, owed by settler governments to Indigenous people as compensation for injustice and dispossession.16 Governments, meanwhile, considered this ‘tax-payers’ money’ and required detailed reporting.17 As with other sectors, the proper relationship between the Indigenous sector and the governments that hold the purse strings has been contested almost from the beginning.
Indigenous activists in the 1970s also saw government funding for their organisations as an important way to secure their political voice, channelled through these organisations.18 Gary Foley (Gumbainggir), for instance, explained that the AMS considered itself ‘in the context of the political struggle because we’re simply an extension of that struggle, working … to ease the plight of the people we are politically working for’.19 Key bureaucrats in the Whitlam government, H.C. Coombs and Barrie Dexter, likewise intended Indigenous organisations to become a means by which First Nations people could voice and achieve their political aspirations (as these organisations had already been doing). That is, they were to have a representative function. And this was considered appropriate: they were locally based and drew on existing partnerships and networks. For the Whitlam government, the blossoming sector was an organic expression of an Indigenous polity.20
This community-controlled sector evolved over the decades from a tiny cluster of organisations powered by a few volunteers and minimal grants to a professionalised enterprise commanding billions of dollars. Commonwealth health expenditure on Aboriginal community organisations, for instance, swelled from just over a million dollars in 1973 to $13 million by 1983, and to $54 million in 1993.21 In the 1970s, there were limited institutional structures that could be used to express self-determination: a handful of community-controlled services and a couple of land councils. Today, health remains the largest segment of the community-controlled sector, but the sector also extends to legal, education and family violence prevention services, along with multiple Aboriginal statutory land rights and native title organisations and Indigenous regional governance structures. The organisations in the sector are mainly government-funded services, with governance drawn from communities. Although funded by the state, they draw money from various levels of government so are not entirely dependent on any. Many are represented by the national peak body, the Coalition of Peaks. There is also a growing Indigenous business sector, but at this stage it does not have sectoral representation and is not connected to the Coalition of Peaks.
Things have changed since the 1970s. But many of the changes for Australian Indigenous people can be attributed, in part, to the successes of the Indigenous organisational sector. There is a growing highly educated professional class within the Indigenous community. We now have numerous Indigenous parliamentarians across Australia. The community-controlled sector has enabled First Nations people to challenge institutions, forge pathways into universities, create culturally safe spaces in schools and workplaces and to take up ranks in the professions and academies. At the local level, Indigenous community organisations have become key instruments of authority and have enabled communities both to build their own services and develop their own skills and capacities.22
The Coalition of Peaks and Closing the Gap refresh
In the early 2000s, as both sides of the political spectrum were decrying the death of self-determination, a coalition of grassroots Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations coalesced into a new campaign. They wanted to ‘Close the Gap’. At first it was a community-driven movement. It sprung up as many across the political spectrum were searching for new policy consensuses in Indigenous affairs. Close the Gap, led by the Australian Human Rights Commission (renamed the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission – HREOC – in 2008) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma (Kungarakan Iwaidja), brought a human rights approach to questions of health equity. It campaigned for governments to develop clear Indigenous policy targets that would ‘close gaps’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.23
Yet as governments became involved, the Indigenous organisational sector was shut out of the movement. In 2007 and 2008, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) settled a series of agreements referred to as ‘Closing the Gap’. These included Indigenous policy targets for: life expectancy; infant mortality; early childhood education in remote communities; reading, writing and numeracy achievements; retention rates to Year 12; and employment outcomes. They also included national partnership funding agreements across sectors related to these targets. These were negotiated among governments rather than the organisations that originally campaigned for this approach; Indigenous organisations were consulted but had no seat at the negotiation table. Each year in parliament since 2009, the prime minister has tabled an annual Closing the Gap Report (to which HREOC has responded annually with its counter reports, Close the Gap). The outcomes have been disappointing.
Self-determination, meanwhile, seemed to be at a low ebb. In May 2017, the authors of the Uluru Statement called for ‘a First Nations Voice’ to achieve ‘justice and self-determination’.24 But the Turnbull government dismissed the Statement as soon as it had been delivered. Like other conservative governments, it was suspicious of national articulations of Indigenous self-determination through representation, preferring instead to work with local Indigenous organisations. In the meantime, governments had begun developing a ‘Closing the Gap Refresh’ and in October 2018 a newly formed Coalition of Aboriginal Peak Organisations intervened in the Refresh process. According to the Coalition of Peaks, this intervention was an ‘act of self-determination’.25 The Coalition wrote to the prime minister, premiers and chief ministers, insisting that Indigenous communities must be represented in these negotiations:
We write concerning the Closing the Gap Refresh, a joint initiative of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), to ask that you not endorse any revised approach at COAG without the necessary input and support from Indigenous communities; and that you put in place a mechanism for those representing Indigenous communities to be able to negotiate and reach agreement on the new Closing the Gap framework and for a continued role in its implementation.26
At this stage, the Coalition of Peaks was an alliance of 13 organisations across the health, legal, family violence prevention and land rights/native title sectors (it now comprises over 50 peak and member organisations). They had been consulted, individually, through the processes for setting priorities and targets. They had not, however, been included in drafting policy documents or the COAG decision-making process. Their intervention was to insist that governments go beyond consultation to shared decision-making with ‘those representing Indigenous communities’.27 Indigenous organisations put governments in a position where they could not refuse Indigenous involvement.
The negotiations resulted in the first intergovernmental agreement in which non-government Indigenous stakeholders were also signatories. Having non-government partners at the table interrupted the usual Commonwealth/State and Territory dynamics. The Indigenous involvement also produced a markedly different agreement. The final National Agreement on Closing the Gap included a significantly stronger focus on Indigenous-led data and evaluation processes; building and strengthening structures that empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to share decision-making authority with governments to accelerate policy and place-based progress; a stronger and defined role for the Aboriginal community-controlled sector; and a clearer policy objective in the reform of government systems. The Coalition of Peaks was particularly concerned about improving the quality of Indigenous access, control and use of data. It also ensured that independent First Nations–led reviews will be carried out following independent reviews by the Productivity Commission. The idea was to create a mechanism whereby governments could be held accountable to First Nations peoples.28 They flipped older models of accountability upside down.
Of course, the Coalition of Peaks was imperfect and limited in its representation of Indigenous communities.29 Not all its peak organisations agreed on all policy priorities and targets, nor were its positions representative of the full diversity of Indigenous political interests. Significantly, it is not a democratically elected representative body and most of its member organisations remain dependent on government sources of funding. Its capacity to challenge governments, therefore, was necessarily limited. It is not the Voice to Parliament envisaged by the authors of the Uluru Statement.30 Leading constitutional lawyer Megan Davis (a Cobble Cobble woman) expressed concern, therefore, that First Nations peoples are framed simply as the ‘Indigenous sector’, along with the ‘business sector’ or ‘education sector’. First Nations political claims lie in their distinct peoplehood because, whereas peoples and nations might be self-determining, sectors have only ‘interests’.31 There is a real risk, therefore, that understanding First Nations peoples primarily as a sector inadvertently diminishes the strength of their unique claims.32
But unlike other ‘sectors’, we think Indigenous organisations can be understood as constituting an Indigenous order of government for the way that they both serve and represent distinct peoples (rather than a mere interest group). If government is understood as a process rather than simply a structure, the Indigenous sector can claim to represent Indigenous people in some way.33 Most importantly, in the absence of a body that might speak to parliaments or governments (and in light of government actions to dismantle such bodies as ATSIC or thwart their establishment, as in the Voice) the Coalition of Peaks had a vital representative function. Interestingly, many Indigenous leaders in the community-controlled sector of today had been involved in ATSIC, including Pat Turner (Arrente Gurdanji) herself, the convenor of the Coalition of Peaks. The efforts of the Coalition of Peaks, therefore, in part grew out of the formative experience of ATSIC. Through the Coalition of Peaks, First Nations peoples found alternative and innovative avenues to build forms of representation and engage in decision-making.
According to historian Tim Rowse, the ongoing difficulties faced by the Indigenous sector in claiming legitimately to represent Indigenous people date right back to flaws and contradictions (reflecting internal differences) in the Whitlam government’s agenda for self-determination in the 1970s. The Whitlam government encouraged Indigenous political expression and self-government through the Indigenous sector, acknowledging these organisations had a representative role, while also pursuing ‘parliamentary’ or democratically elected forms of representation.34 The relationship between these two forms of representation and their role in achieving self-determination has been unresolved ever since. This tension was evident within ATSIC as it sought to fulfil both forms of representation: its function as an elected body and its program-delivery role (a dual function that left it vulnerable to charges of misuse of funds).35 And it continues today in discussions around the role of the community-controlled sector and its relationship to the anticipated Voice to Parliament.
Lessons from history: ‘Work with us’
Government commitment to a vision of self-determination for First Nations people might be at a low ebb. But that does not mean self-determination has failed. As Wiradjuri scholar Robynne Quiggin has argued, Indigenous Australia is self-determining and calls on governments to catch up with its agenda: ‘The most consistent call from Indigenous Australia since the abandonment of self-determination policy is – “listen to us”. Consistent with the fact that we continue to be self-determining despite government policy, we say “Listen to us”, “work with us so that we can set our own course”.’36
When Whitlam heeded Indigenous calls for self-determination and identified the emerging Indigenous community-controlled sector as central to achieving that vision, his government set in motion a form of self-determination that cannot be contained. Indeed, the Indigenous sector has been described as the defining legacy of the Whitlam self-determination policy; its successes as well as its limitations were set in motion through the policies of that era.37
Since the 1970s, and through the energy, experiences and empowerment of the Indigenous sector, new generations of First Nations leaders have emerged across the community, academy, public sector and business world.38 The Indigenous professional class is booming, growing in size by some 75 per cent from 1996 to 2006 and gaining on the professionalisation of the general population.39 First Nations people are exercising increasing control of their own affairs in the domains of land rights, health, education and environmental management through Indigenous organisations, as well as self-government through local Aboriginal councils.40 Building on experiences in this sector, First Nations people within government bureaucracies and peak bodies are meanwhile also advancing Indigenous interests, despite the absence of a democratically elected representative voice, and becoming ever more assertive.41 Policymakers can no longer simply consult First Nations people; they must work with them.
The example of the Coalition of Peaks is testimony to the resilience and permanence of diverse forms of Indigenous representation. We do not know yet what the long-term effects of the National Agreement will be, and there is much the Coalition of Peaks was unable to achieve due to governments’ resistance. Still, its ability to insert itself into inter-government negotiations shows how Indigenous non-government actors can exploit the possibilities of liberal governmentality to benefit the communities they serve. First Nations people created an infrastructure that, in light of the failure of governments to commit to constitutional change, provided a form of Indigenous representation at the highest of levels as the constitutional discussion rolled on. This, we suggest, is a kind of Indigenous self-determination, particularly in the absence of other more fully representative options.
The example of the Coalition of Peaks shows how self-determination can be realised in different political forms, in different political structures, in ways that respond to the circumstances of Indigenous Australia and harness its creativity and political will. It also shows how, once institutions are established (in this case the Indigenous community-controlled sector), they create pathways that are not readily unwound, no matter the policies and views of subsequent governments. Governments might provide conditions that either hinder or support self-determination. But whatever they do, the self-determination genie is well and truly out of the bottle.